Appendix:
The “V.O.N. Munchdriller” stories from The Driller
The “William Z. Williams” stories from Excavating Engineer

FREE FREDRIC BROWN STORY:“BLOOD OF THE DRAGON”

To whet your appetite for MURDER DRAWS A CROWD, we have posted the text of an early Fredric Brown story, “Blood of the Dragon” from Variety Detective Magazine Feb. 39. Enjoy!

CHIEF OF POLICE Walworth smacked the top of his desk with his hand so hard that the impact sounded like a revolver shot. “I tell you, ‘Deadpan,’ we’ve got to get those counterfeiters soon, damn soon, or the commissioner will have me out on the sidewalk. And the newspapers are howling like banshees!” His ace detective and closest friend, seated across the desk from him, replied calmly, placatingly: “We’ve been doing everything we can, Phil. After all—” “We know the stuff’s being made right in or near this very town. Whenever a green-goods dealer or pusher gets picked up anywhere in the state[MORE]

A BRIEF FREDRIC BROWN BIOGRAPHY

Fredric Brown (October 29, 1906 – March 11, 1972 was perhaps best known for his use of humor and for his mastery of the “short short” form—stories of 1 to 3 pages, often with ingenious plotting devices and surprise endings. Humor and a somewhat postmodern outlook carried over into his novels as well.
Brown’s first mystery novel, The Fabulous Clipjoint, won the Edgar Award for outstanding first mystery novel. It began a series starring Ed and Ambrose Hunter, and depicts how a young man gradually ripens into a detective under the tutelage of his uncle, an ex–private eye now working as a carnival concessionaire.
Many of his books make use of the threat of the supernatural or occult before the “straight” explanation at the end. For example, Night of the Jabberwock is a bizarre and humorous narrative of an extraordinary day in the life of a small-town newspaper editor.The Screaming Mimi (which became a 1958 movie starring Anita Ekberg and Gypsy Rose Lee, and directed by Gerd Oswald) and The Far Cry are noir suspense novels reminiscent of the work of Cornell Woolrich. The Lenient Beast experiments multiple first-person viewpoints, among them a gentle, deeply religious serial killer, and examines racial tensions between whites and Latinos in the US state of Arizona. Here Comes a Candle is told in straight narrative sections alternating with a radio script, a screenplay, a sportscast, a teleplay, a stage play, and a newspaper article.
The famous mystery writer Mickey Spillane called Brown “my favorite writer of all time.” Neil Gaiman has also expressed fondness for Brown’s work, having his novel Here Comes A Candle narrated by the character Rose Walker in the collection The Sandman: The Kindly Ones. Also in the Sandman graphic novels, Fredric Brown is a character in the first story of “The Sandman: Dream Country.”
Brown also had the honor of being one of three dedicatees of Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (the other two being Robert Cornog and Philip Jose Farmer).
In his non-fiction book Danse Macabre (1981), a survey of the horror genre since 1950, writer Stephen King includes an appendix of “roughly one hundred” influential books of the period: Fredric Brown’s short-story collection Nightmares and Geezenstacks is included, and is, moreover, asterisked as being among those select works King regards as “particularly important.”—Adapted from Wikipedia.

A NOTE ON AMAZON.COM AVAILABILITY

After much deliberation, it has been decided that MURDER DRAWS A CROWD will not be available directly from Amazon.com. Once we have all the advance orders shipped, we will be listing copies for sale in the Amazon Marketplace at $45 plus $3.99 shipping. So, for this title at least, support your humble Poobah and/or support your favorite specialty bookseller.

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